This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Containers must be filled with liquids or gases for numerous technical applications. A typical application in this respect are motor vehicles where housings, circuits, equalizing reservoirs and the like have to be filled with fuel, lubricants, coolants, and other operating substances. In the manufacturing process, these vehicles must be filled, for example, with brake fluid, power steering fluid, coolant, refrigerant, windshield wiper fluid, and fuel. These media are fed via hoses and special adapters to the respective circuits of the vehicles. The hoses typically include multiple lines with different functions for vacuum application, back suction, filling, aerating, as well as for electrical cables.
To perform the filling, a worker has to bring the adapter and hose pack to the vehicle depending on the respective position of the filling station and connect it to the ports of the circuits to be filled.
These assemblies must undergo periodic maintenance to ensure that the filling adapter is functional. It is preferably performed at defined cycles, which can be related, for example, to continually recurring periods or to utilization periods. However, keeping track of these cycles depends on the thoroughness of the maintenance operations (customer). It cannot be excluded that maintenance intervals are not exactly complied with. Such risk is particularly considerable if the filling adapter is not exclusively used with the same filling station but at various filling stations. For maintenance cycles based on time, it is also questionable if the filling adapter really has been used frequently enough that maintenance is required. For maintenance cycles based on use, multiple filling adapters may be needing maintenance within a short time interval. If these maintenance operations are not performed, there can be unforeseen failures of the filling adapters on the assembly line, which in extreme cases can result in a temporary shutdown of the assembly line.